Typical friend-of-friend exploration on the web is not a friendly experience for mainstream users because it involves navigating websites and often looking at flat lists of people. Typically, these web sites provide services that refer people to friends, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, and so on. When user signs up, they provide a list of list of interests and asked for a list of their friends and their e-mail addresses. If their friends also sign up, they are asked to confirm their relationship to the inviter. Once these social links are established, users can traverse the entire web of contacts, finding people they would like to meet and sending them a message. The invitation feature creates a system of validating social relationships and provides a kind of virtual “vouch” that protects participants from random contacts.
There are several limitations of these services, in that they are not real-time, lack graphical navigation and do not provide for relationships other than friends. What is needed is a system that overcomes these and other limitations to provide a real-time graphical system to allow users to simulate a graphical web of interconnected nodes, and enhancing the quality of the user's visualization of the relationships. The present invention provides such a solution.